Re: shortening a stem

[Nick Payne]

On 08/04/13 14:31, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > what must I write to shorten an unbeamed stem by, say, one unit?
> > > A naive approach would be
> > >
> > >    \once \override Stem.length #(- ly:stem::calc-length 1)
> > >
> > > which doesn't work of course...
> > David Nalesnik wrote a very versatile function that makes such
> > things very easy.  You can find it in a thread titled "generalizing
> > offsets to properties" on -devel.
> Indeed, very nice!  Thanks for the link.  Unfortunately, it doesn't
> work with Stem.length at all because this is not an `offset'.

Have you tried using

\once \override Stem.length-fraction = #(magstep -n)

where n is a numeric value. Unfortunately the amount of shortening is 
not consistent across all notes for a particular value of n. e.g.

\relative f' {
  c
  \once \override Stem #'length-fraction = #(magstep -3) c
  e
  \once \override Stem #'length-fraction = #(magstep -3) e
}

will shorten the stem on the E more than it will the stem on the C.